This week has been a Week, just now coming back to this ...
I appreciate your coming back to it! Condolences on your week?
(there are some books with wincingly racist stereotype Asian characters and yet one of his earliest Asian characters is a perfectly fine not-at-all-stereotypical side character who speaks fluent English; there's one book that drops a blazingly racist incident in the middle when everything is fine with the exact same ethnic group on either side, like he was suddenly possessed by the ghost of HP Lovecraft for a few pages there)
I saw something like that in the work of John Russell, who wrote a lot of short stories (mostly in the 1920's, mostly set in the South Pacific) which could be classified as colonial adventures and were completely unpredictable as to their degree of racism, which could fall anywhere on the spectrum from story-killing to actively argued with and did not seem to map to any kind of hierarchy of sympathy that I could identify; I finally decided that when he wrote non-white characters as protagonists or perspective characters, they became people for him, and when they were part of the local color of the adventure, he was much more likely to fall back on stereotypes. So your feeling that Johns was interested in people even if he did not always render them accurately makes sense to me. It is interesting to me that he never seems to have had any kind of problem with immigrants as a group, but these days frankly that's refreshing.
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I appreciate your coming back to it! Condolences on your week?
(there are some books with wincingly racist stereotype Asian characters and yet one of his earliest Asian characters is a perfectly fine not-at-all-stereotypical side character who speaks fluent English; there's one book that drops a blazingly racist incident in the middle when everything is fine with the exact same ethnic group on either side, like he was suddenly possessed by the ghost of HP Lovecraft for a few pages there)
I saw something like that in the work of John Russell, who wrote a lot of short stories (mostly in the 1920's, mostly set in the South Pacific) which could be classified as colonial adventures and were completely unpredictable as to their degree of racism, which could fall anywhere on the spectrum from story-killing to actively argued with and did not seem to map to any kind of hierarchy of sympathy that I could identify; I finally decided that when he wrote non-white characters as protagonists or perspective characters, they became people for him, and when they were part of the local color of the adventure, he was much more likely to fall back on stereotypes. So your feeling that Johns was interested in people even if he did not always render them accurately makes sense to me. It is interesting to me that he never seems to have had any kind of problem with immigrants as a group, but these days frankly that's refreshing.